Because the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), which spends $9 million per year getting its message out, needs help getting its message out, its president, Arthur Brooks is on the front page of the New York Times Sunday Review again this week. When he’s not spending rich people’s money to, for example, advocate for more military funding, Brooks takes time to promote a feel-good, post-materialist message for the rich-who-just-happen-to-be-rich.
But there’s a funny thing in the middle of today’s message to “love people, use things.”
Easier said than done, I realize. It requires the courage to repudiate pride and the strength to love others — family, friends, colleagues, acquaintances, God and even strangers and enemies. Only deny love to things that actually are objects.
Wait, God? Why is God in the middle of this list of people we should love? You could say (as he has) that religious people are happier, and that loving God is part of an uplifting selflessness. But I suspect this is more a political nod. Brooks is making a name as a compassionate conservative, dedicated above all to free markets but making American conservatives nervous by dropping in the importance of “safety-net policies for the indigent” (definition of indigent obviously the question being begged).
His brand of right-wing politics is not practically separable from conservative religious groups and ideologies, so regardless of his beliefs (which I don’t know), he can’t exclude God. For example, the Donors Capital Fund (DCF), which at $19 million aince 1990 is one of the top contributors to AEI, and on whose board Brooks sits, gives millions to a mix of education causes (e.g., charter schools), religious organizations (e.g., the Israeli right wing and God’s World Publications), conservative think tanks (Hudson, Ayn Rand, Heritage), and Republican activists (FreedomWorks). It’s hard to get the God out of that mix, even if you wanted to.
It’s too easy to accuse people like Brooks of hypocrisy, so I won’t belabor this, but I also note that DCF in 2012 gave $125,000 to the National Organization for Marriage, which that year pursued a project the “strategic goal” of which was “to drive a wedge between gays and blacks” in their campaign to deny marriage to gays and lesbians. Isn’t love grand?
Other posts on American Enterprise Institute:
- Millennial, save thyself
- Charles Murray on his propaganda playing field
- Getting beyond how the ‘Factual Feminist’ is wrong about the prevalence of rape
- Brad Wilcox tries to save saving marriage for the marriage movement
Family Inequality 
Loving God and your wife and kids and friends may make you happier, as Brooks says, but it doesn’t necessarily make you a better person, especially when it comes to policies that affect people who do not love or even know your friends, your family, or your god.
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I agree. I forgot to mention that the religious donation tax exemption is an important economic issue for his base as well.
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Wait, God? Why is God in the middle of this list of people we should love? You could say (as he has) that religious people are happier, and that loving God is part of an uplifting selflessness.
Or you could say this:
From the dawn of the modern age, religious thinkers have warned that, strictly speaking, secular politics is impossible — that without the transcendent foundation of Judeo-Christian monotheism to limit the political sphere, ostensibly secular citizens would begin to invest political ideas and ideologies with transcendent, theological meaning.
Put somewhat differently: Human beings will be religious one way or another. Either they will be religious about religious things, or they will be religious about political things.
With traditional faith in rapid retreat over the past decade, liberals have begun to grow increasingly religious about their own liberalism, which they are treating as a comprehensive view of reality and the human good.
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